A second attempt with a team, consisting of Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting, and Amundsen himself, departed on 19 October 1911.

With him on this expedition were Oscar Wisting and Helmer Hanssen, both of whom had accompanied Amundsen to the South Pole.

In 1926, Amundsen and 15 other men ( including Ellsworth, Riiser-Larsen, Oscar Wisting, and the Italian air crew led by aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile ) made the first crossing of the Arctic in the airship Norge designed by Nobile.

If the Norge expedition was actually the first to the North Pole, Amundsen and Oscar Wisting would therefore be the first persons to reach each geographical pole, by ground or by air, as the case may be.

If Byrd and Bennett did not reach the North Pole, it is extremely likely that the first flight over the Pole occurred a few days later, on May 12, 1926 with the flight of the airship Norge and its crew of Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and others.

The 16-man expedition included Amundsen, the expedition leader and navigator ; Umberto Nobile the airship's designer and pilot ; polar explorer and expedition sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth ; as well as polar explorer Oscar Wisting who served as helmsman.

On 14 December 1911 along with Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Olav Bjaaland and Sverre Hassel, Wisting planted the Norwegian flag on the Geographic South Pole, the first explorers to have reached that point.

From 1923 to 1925 Wisting more or less acted as leader of the expedition after Amundsen left to try to fly to the pole instead.

In addition Wisting, along with Amundsen, was one of the two first persons who had been to both the North Pole and the South Pole.

Oscar Wisting wrote about his experiences with Roald Amundsen in 19 Ar Med Roald Amundsen ( Oslo: Glydendal Norsk Forlag. 1930 ).

* Mount Wisting – the northwesternmost summit of the massif at the head of Amundsen Glacier in the Queen Maud Mountains.

He was one of the first five people to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911, along with Roald Amundsen, Olav Bjaaland, Oscar Wisting, and Sverre Hassel.

On 14 December 1911, Hassel together with Amundsen, Hanssen, Olav Bjaaland and Oscar Wisting were the first to reach the South Pole.

Scott refused to amend his schedule to deal with the Amundsen threat, writing, " The proper, as well as the wiser course, is for us to proceed exactly as though this had not happened ".

The chosen group marched on, reaching the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find that Amundsen had preceded them by five weeks.

Scott's group took this photograph of themselves using a string to operate the shutter on 17 January 1912, the day after they discovered Amundsen had reached the pole first.

Even before Scott's death was known, Amundsen had been offended by what he felt was a " sneering toast "' from RGS President Lord Curzon, at a meeting held supposedly to honour the polar victor.

Amundsen had hidden a lifelong desire inspired by Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland in 1888 and the doomed Franklin expedition.

In 1903, Amundsen led the first expedition to successfully traverse Canada's Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans ( something explorers had been attempting since the days of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and Henry Hudson ), with six others in a 45-ton fishing vessel, Gjøa.

Amundsen had the ship outfitted with a small gasoline engine.

Five hundred miles ( 800 km ) away, Eagle City, Alaska, had a telegraph station ; Amundsen travelled there ( and back ) overland to wire a success message ( collect ) on 5 December 1905.

It was at this time that Amundsen received news that Norway had formally become independent of Sweden and had a new king.

Amundsen had problems and hesitation raising funds for the departure and upon hearing in 1909 that first Frederick Cook and then Robert Peary claimed the Pole, he decided to reroute to Antarctica.

Amundsen planned to freeze the Maud into the polar ice cap and drift towards the North Pole ( as Nansen had done with the Fram ), and he did so off Cape Chelyuskin.

During this time, Amundsen participated little in the work outdoors, such as sleigh rides and hunting, because he had been subjected to numerous accidents.

Many of these carefully collected scientific data had been lost during the ill-fated journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen, two crew members sent on a mission by Amundsen, but they were later retrieved by Russian scientist Nikolay Urvantsev as they lay abandoned on the Kara Sea shores.

Amundsen disappeared on 18 June 1928 while flying on a rescue mission with Norwegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, French pilot René Guilbaud, and three more Frenchmen, looking for missing members of Nobile's crew, whose new airship Italia had crashed while returning from the North Pole.

However, they reached the pole a month after Roald Amundsen and his team, who had climbed the previously unknown Axel Heiberg Glacier.

The report about this journey closed with a quotation by Helmer Hanssen, who had been responsible for the welfare of the sled dogs in Amundsen ’ s South Pole team:

Amundsen and his men, racing for the South Pole with Robert Falcon Scott, started out for the South Pole too early in the season and had to return to base camp at the Bay of Whales.

Amundsen had taken the best dogsled and sped off towards the camp without regard for his men as a storm approached.

79 days later, Wilson was one of the five-man Polar party that reached the Pole on 18 January 1912, only to find the pole had been claimed by Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his team just 5 weeks earlier.

A study in October 2004 suggested that because the ice in the Amundsen Sea had been melting rapidly and became riveted with cracks, the offshore ice shelf was set to collapse " within five years ".

Amundsen had previously in spring 1925 flown to within 150 nautical miles ( 280 km ) of the North Pole, in a pair of Italian-built Dornier Wal flying boats along with the American millionaire-adventurer Lincoln Ellsworth, the pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, but their planes were forced to land near 88 degrees North and the six men were trapped on the ice for 30 days.

Huntford's controversial The Last Place on Earth ( originally titled Scott and Amundsen ) had a tremendous impact on public interest in Polar matters.

An article in The Times, reporting on the glowing tributes paid to Scott in the New York press, claimed that both Amundsen and Shackleton were " to hear that such a disaster could overtake a well-organized expedition ".

The Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers, which both flow into the Amundsen Sea, are two of Antarctica's largest five.

The placement of Scott, both in relation to Amundsen and the lunar south pole, relates to the Antarctic explorers Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, and their race to be the first humans to reach the south pole of the Earth.

Together with Roald Amundsen he was the first person to reach both the North and South Poles.

Amundsen Circle and the Amundsen Trail for joggers both commemorate explorer Roald Amundsen.

The project involved over-wintering the Amundsen in the Banks Island flaw lead in the Southern Beaufort Sea, the first time this has ever been done.

Each of the installations containing these central units has been named the Amundsen – Scott South Pole Station.

Relations between Amundsen and Nobile, which had been strained in the freezing, cramped and noisy conditions became even worse when Amundsen saw that the Italian flag dropped was larger than either of the others.

Gjøa was much smaller than vessels used by other Arctic expeditions, but Amundsen intended to live off the limited resources of the land and sea through which he was to travel, and reasoned that the land could sustain only a tiny crew ( this had been the cause of the catastrophic failure of John Franklin's expedition fifty years previously ).

Amundsen knew that the notoriety that his exploits aboard Gjøa had earned him would allow him access to Nansen's ship Fram, which had been custom-made for ice work and was owned by the Norwegian state.

Some of the present Inuit people claim to be descendants of Amundsen ( or his companions ), but that has been refuted.

Those dogs, owned by Lindberg's mining company Pioneer Mining Co., had originally been scheduled to take explorer Roald Amundsen to the North Pole, but with the impending outbreak of World War I, the trip was canceled and dogs were given to Seppala.